Somebody sent me a link and expressed their concerns about the upcoming synod on the family.
It's from December but I thought it worth sharing.
This is kinda smelly.
“This witness,” the Bishop of Rome emphasized, “pertain to the People of God, a People of prophets, in its entirety. By the gift of the Holy Spirit, the members of the Church possess a ‘sense of faith’. This is a kind of ‘spiritual instinct’ that makes us ‘sentire cum Ecclesia’ [think with the mind of the Church] and to discern that which is in conformity with the apostolic faith and is in the spirit of the Gospel. Of course, the ‘sensus fidelium’ [sense of the faithful] cannot be confused with the sociological reality of a majority opinion. It is, therefore, important—and one of your tasks—to develop criteria that allow the authentic expressions of the ‘sensus fidelium’ to be discerned. … This attention is of greatest importance for theologians. Pope Benedict XVI often pointed out that the theologian must remain attentive to the faith lived by the humble and the small, to whom it pleased the Father to reveal that which He had hidden from the learned and the wise.
You think he was thinking Lumen Gentium and it got lost in the cavern between the brain and translation?
It would seem so, as he mentions the sensus fidelium has nothing to do with majority opinion but I am perplexed as to why the Pope doesn't see the danger in this useless exercise in a period of history where the faithful have been deprived of Catechesis for fifty years.
Sadly, you can't just let people get up and talk about the feelings they have about what Church teaching because Sister Wearthepants has been calibrating Church teaching for the overwhelming majority of Catholics.
The status of affairs should be patently clear to the Pope. The execution of the concept was played out when he selected Cardinal Kasper to orchestrate a free for all with his see of Bishops. It ended in a train wreck that caused a scandal and lack of trust in the agenda of his leadership.
Leadership is a bit like engineering. There are many facets to executing an objective. Spiritual leadership adds a whole other dimension that requires discernment on the audience, players, education level, time in history, place.
What substance to I have in front of me?
What are the goals?
How can I accomplish them under these circumstances?
We have a problem with faithfulness in the see of Bishops. The see of Bishops saturates their unfaithfulness into the formation of priests. The poorly formed priests saturate their unfaithfulness into the parish and schools. Those of us who somehow managed to escape it with Sacramental Grace wage the battle for the salvation of souls inside of our homes and relationships with the people we love.
After fifty years of it, there is no place on earth where you can assemble Catholics and invite them to inform the Holy Father what Church teaching is all about.
Not even with the Pope's own see of Bishops.
This is neither the time nor the place in history to assemble the village idiots to inform the Pope.
3 comments:
This is in the comments from the article. How good is this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEchg1KhmTY
Lutheran Satire gets it!
When it comes to "sentire cum ecclesia," I stick with St. Ignatius of Loyola's "Rules for Thinking with the Church", which he gives in an appendix to his Spiritual Exercises:
1. We must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the true Spouse of Jesus Christ, our holy Mother, the hierarchical Church.
2. We should praise sacramental confession, the yearly reception of the Most Blessed Sacrament [the Lord's Supper], and praise more highly monthly reception, and still more weekly Communion....
3. We ought to praise the frequent hearing of Mass, the singing of hymns, psalmody, and long prayers whether in the church or outside....
4. We must praise highly religious life, virginity, and continency; and matrimony ought not be praised as much as any of these.
5. We should praise vows of religion, obedience, poverty, chastity, and vows to perform other works of supererogation conducive to perfection....
6. We should show our esteem for the relics of the saints by venerating them and praying to the saints. We should praise visits to the Station Churches, pilgrimages, indulgences, jubilees, the lighting of candles in churches.
7. We must praise the regulations of the Church, with regard to fast and abstinence, for example, in Lent, on Ember Days, Vigils, Fridays, and Saturdays.
8. We ought to praise not only the building and adornment of churches, hut also images and veneration of them according to the subject they represent.
9. Finally, we must praise all the commandments of the Church, and be on the alert to find reasons to defend them, and by no means in order to criticize them.
10. We should be more ready to approve and praise the orders, recommendations, and way of acting of our superiors than to find fault with them. Though some of the orders, etc., may not have been praiseworthy, yet to speak against them, either when preaching in public or in speaking before the people, would rather be the cause of murmuring and scandal than of profit. As a consequence, the people would become angry with their superiors, whether secular or spiritual. But while it does harm in the absence of our superiors to speak evil of them before the people, it may be profitable to discuss their bad conduct with those who can apply a remedy.
13. If we wish to proceed securely in all things, we must hold fast to the following principle: What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines. For I must be convinced that in Christ our Lord, the bridegroom, and in His spouse the Church, only one Spirit holds sway, which governs and rules for the salvation of souls.
love it.
Think he would be willing to pass it out to guide the synod?
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